Rahal Gets Out of a Deep Hole : Long Beach: After early pit stop because of steering problems, he rallies for second place.

If you can’t win the race, you drive to finish and hope for the best.

It’s a strategy as old as auto racing, and lots of successful drivers owe at least some of their success to it. But Bobby Rahal went along with only part of that program Sunday in the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach.

Certainly he was hoping to finish, but he wanted to make a race of it, not a parade. Rahal is the defending champion in the Indy car series, and people expect him to run with the leaders.

But he hasn’t been especially competitive this season in his Chevrolet-powered, American built RH chassis--the only made-in-America car in the series. He was sixth in the season opener at Surfers Paradise, Australia, but was a lap off the pace. And he finished 22nd two weeks ago at Phoenix, where his car quit after 63 laps.

So his second-place finish Sunday was a real season brightener. And, although Rahal benefited considerably by attrition late in the race, he was a man in a hurry all afternoon.

Once he got his car working the way he wanted with a suspension change late in the race, he was the fastest driver on the track, cutting into winner Paul Tracy’s lead by 1 1/2 seconds a lap, closing to within 12.658 seconds at the checkered flag.

Who knows what might have happened if he hadn’t spent most of the early part of the race playing catch-up?

“I had a reasonably good start (from the 11th position) and passed about three or four cars and was about to pass (Eddie) Cheever and all of a sudden the car started under-steering very badly,” Rahal said, describing his problems in Sunday’s opening laps. “I thought I had a flat, and rather than risk the thing blowing on me and wasting even more time, I came in and we had to fill up a seal.

“So I spent most of the race wondering where everybody was. But they weren’t catching me and we were catching them, so we were going pretty quickly.

“(At the end) I could see Paul. I’m sure he was just being careful, but you never know. I could see me catching him and I was thinking, ‘Hey, this is all right. Maybe we can make a run out of this thing after all.’

“But it’s a little disappointing when you have to pit (early), and that’s the last you see of everybody for the next 45 minutes. We made a suspension change in the car after the last yellow (flag) and that really helped.”

It wasn’t until a late-race duel with Raul Boesel for third place that anyone took note of Rahal.

“It took some time to get by him,” Rahal said. “He could pull me just a little bit down the front straight, but we could out-brake him in the corners and I made several runs at him and he made his car very wide. Finally, I sort of feinted to the left, and I think maybe he thought I was going to stay out there, but I cut back (instead).”

So, in the third race of the season, the last before the Indianapolis 500, Rahal finally became competitive.

“Australia and Phoenix were a little embarrassing,” he said. “When you have a race like today, it makes you feel like you’re doing the right thing after all. I think the season starts now.”

Scot Lemon of Phoenix, lead mechanic for Scott Pruett, suffered a broken left ankle and a sprained right foot when he was struck by the right rear tire of Pruett’s car while in the pit.

His injuries were stabilized by Dr. Nicolas Bonfilio at the traveling Indy Car Medical Center, and Lemon is expected to seek follow-up treatment at home in Phoenix.